You say this as if it were necessarily irrational.
Clothes became chain-stitched (and later lock-stitched) because machines could chain-stitch. If there were a super-efficient hammering machine, it could be better to figure out ways to use nails to replace screws in designs than to hold onto screws just for nostalgia's sake.
I think it's better not to fall in love with any single flashcard. Mature them and forget about them. You're not trying to learn flashcards, you're trying to learn facts and skills.
> It doesn't but it also will not create a different sentence to you to practice a word.
Anki doesn't create either words or sentences. Drilling words doesn't work. You've drilled words and found it doesn't work. Try using clozes. It is not "less efficient" than drilling words, because drilling words does not work.
No word in French means anything in English. The meanings of words are just surveys of the contexts in which they are used, and French words are used in French contexts. Learning that a French word means an English word is just bad information that is cluttering up your brain.
If you're learning Spanish, French, German or Italian, try these.
20,000 clozes, words are repeated all the time, treat them as disposable. Read the sentences out loud and say the answers out loud to keep yourself honest.
edit: you don't need AI to generate sentences. There are already sentences available in every language.
A lot of it is actually GPL-washing and rust is the excuse.
I'm on the rewrite it in rust bandwagon, but I secretly want to rewrite things in rust so they can be refactored and made easier to maintain and add features. So "rewrite it in rust" is just like "rewriting it in anything that I'm currently enamored with," and doing it with an LLM (defactoring?) would miss the point for me.
rust being safe(r) just makes the rewrite less risky.
> I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum.
It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.
The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.
I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.
It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition and interfaces. We're calling it too early.
> It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.
I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.
English (like French) is just an absurdly hard language to read and write. Of course there are people who can't, at all. French, although absurd, is probably easier to read than English (though a bit harder to write.)
> In sharp contrast to this are the US and Canada, where there is no shared definition of "white" even though the majority of their populations are ethnically European.
I think you've got this turned around. In the US and Canada "white" is all you have. In Germany you have Germans, in France you have French, in the US, you have "white," which usually means "untraceable white mutt, at least one grandparent didn't speak English, don't be surprised if they're a bit Lebanese, Indian or Mexican."
The difference between Europe and the US is that in the US, the only important thing is not to be black. Europe's hostility is more finely tuned because they have more culture and community to protect (more continuity, more history, etc.)
Once that's gone, it's gone. Greece can't get back its Greekness by importing more Greeks, whereas the US (and the other Anglosphere colonies) can get more white by taking in anyone who isn't black. The colonies are places that often started by being filled with British prisoners; i.e. standards were nil. The standard was that you were white, could kill natives, and in the US, catch slaves.
The lack of an overarching culture in the US is probably why slave and ex-slave culture had such an outsized influence. It's uniquely American.
You're making it sound like the desire to be a Frenchman is an unreasonable requirement for becoming a Frenchman.
> abandon your own language, culture
Thank god nobody is asking this. They're being asked to learn enough French to participate in France. B1 is hard, but it ain't B2, and you'll still barely understand what's going on around you.
The US is an exception, doesn't require language proficiency for almost anything, and doesn't have an official language. This is very controversial in the US, and always has been.
Historically, this can originally be blamed on the desire of the US to import as many European immigrants as quickly as it could after the slaves were freed (post-"1877 Compromise"), because ex-slave votes were changing the composition of government. In 1910, only 60% of white Americans were native born (as opposed to about 98.5% of black Americans.) This period is also referred to as the "nadir of American race relations."
I've always heard it said that "polyglot" starts with the fourth language. The opinion is that to have a at-home (family) language, an outdoor (regional) language and a market (capital) language is too common to be considered truly exceptional. Once you pick up the fourth, you're getting into hobby territory.
Kató Lomb (maybe the first official "simultaneous translator" wrote about gaining, losing, and maintaining languages entertainingly and in detail.
The US has four times as many prisoners per capita as China, the "police state."
edit: some interesting trivia. Due to the combination of America's incarceration rate, a racist justice system, and a completely wealthless and desperate class of freed slaves who were never compensated (although their owners were), Black Americans are 0.5% of the world's population but 5% of the world's prison population.
These are just weird fantasies that you're writing out, with absolutely no reference to any events that have happened in China. You seem to just be writing fiction, and assigning it to the Chinese. The Chinese are actually people, though, they're real. If you want to accuse them of unremitting evil, you should be able to talk about something they did in detail.
That does not mean that you should google "China bad" and paste a bunch of random urls in a reply, though.
What Cold War propaganda did to Western brains is tragic.
Why when Americans do something do we feel like we have to mention the Russians and the Chinese?
Maybe I'm just bad at PR, though. If we call this "Chinese" behavior, maybe it will appeal a particular demographic who would normally support it in order to protect them from "Black Crime."
> The US doesn't need to pass such laws because there are no protections.
The US desperately needs fundamental definitions and protections in regard to privacy, but the fact that it is extremely common for European countries to prosecute illegal speech and associations is a big difference. Americans are trying to defend themselves against the secondary effects of surveillance. Europeans can just jail you for saying magic words, or associating with organizations that have been proscribed.
Also, as of a day or two ago, Europeans can be prosecuted for sharing any RT (Russia Today) content, even in private, regardless of content. These are things that the Bill of Rights makes unthinkable in the US. We can bring assault rifles to anti-government protests; if they're seized we can sue to get them back, and to be compensated for being bothered.
The constitutional documents of European countries and supranational institutions might have been largely cribbed from the US's set, but anything like the Bill of Rights in them is virtually never written as an absolute right. It's stuff like Citizens are guaranteed freedom of expression except in cases where it is necessary to prevent expression to maintain safety or the public order.
I regret to inform you that a temporary exception to a law is also a law.
edit:
> It seems some vertices imposed that they would not accept a legal vacuum there.
I find this sentence unintelligible. Can you come up with another wording? And who are these "vertices" who have been given approval rights over EU legislation?
> If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on.
This is a far more dubious hypothetical. I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years. They're the most successful, most profitable of the bunch. How many of the top 100 companies in terms of revenue do you imagine will disappear in 5 years? I'd guess around 0.0%.
"People move on" is a meaningless statement. Why were there so many colon cancer deaths over the past 5 years? Well, people move on. Why do people move on?
> Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money
i.e. blogging, which once brought in money, doesn't seem to as much anymore. Why?
1) No it does not have to be said. Nobody is forcing anyone to explain anything.
2) I think that the best satire is fair, and should read to the targets as real commentary. When someone takes your satire seriously, it means that you have successfully commented on reality. Is that inverse Poe's Law?
Otherwise you're just putting words in your enemies' mouths that they would not ever say. I think people do this because they don't have the strength of their own convictions, and wouldn't be able to stand people not getting their joke (and worse, confusing them for extreme believers in something that they disdain.)
To them I would suggest that one doesn't try to make arguments through satire, one rather demonstrate arguments through satire. If you need to make your argument with satire, you actually don't have an argument. Satire without a solid underpinning argument is just propaganda.